Dr. Deborah Birx’s rehabilitation tour hit a 12-minute speed bump this week, as CNN anchor Brianna Keilar confronted the former Trump COVID response coordinator about things she said—and, perhaps most notably did not—during her tenure in Donald Trump’s White House. Birx, whose failure to speak out against Trump’s false claims about the coronavirus came to define her legacy, has been making the rounds to promote her new book, Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, COVID-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It’s Too Late. In it, she writes that the majority of the deaths after the first surge could have been “mitigated or reduced substantially with better leadership.” Keilar began her interview by asking, “Does that include, with better leadership from you?”—a question on many minds, apparently, based on the damning videos of what Birx was actually saying at that time that have recirculated in response to her press blitz. (Birx replied, “That includes all of us.”) One such video was played back to the doctor during the interview:
Keilar—who has previously criticized Birx for, in the post-Trump era, pushing a narrative that minimizes the extent to which she helped enable the president’s catastrophic handling of the pandemic—showed Birx a compilation of videos of Trump advocating for the U.S. to do less testing because it would decrease the number of cases. “Things were being said, and we were doing the opposite,” Birx said in response, claiming...
Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday strongly rejected reports claiming that the government was planning to impose restrictions or additional taxes on foreign travel. In a rare move, PM Modi per...